The Hurricane Is History, but for Battered Honduras the Agony Lingers

The bulldozers have reopened the highway below her house in the village of Balin, clearing away tons of earth that slid down the mountain during a hurricane in November, plowing under houses, gardens, animals and 17 human beings.

The growling machines have smoothed over the ugly gash in the earth and molded a new dirt road. Trucks rumble through Leila Marina Morales's life again, linking the country's interior to the sea, as they always did before.

But now there is a hole in the universe where her family once was.

''For me it seems as if everything is a dream, as if my family has gone on a trip and will return,'' Ms. Marina Morales, 27, a housewife, said, peering up at the sheered mountain that swallowed her mother and three sisters on Nov. 2. ''But at the same time I must accept that they died.''

Two months after the storm called Mitch mauled this hilly and poor country in late October, Hondurans like Miss Marina Morales are still trying to come to terms with the disaster and their losses, both personal and financial.

Hurricane Mitch was one of the region's worst natural disasters this century. It left several thousand dead and hundreds of thousands homeless, while crippling the economies of Honduras and Nicaragua. By some estimates, the storm caused at least $5.4 billion in damage to infrastructure and crops, international lending institutions say.

Both Nicaragua and Honduras were devastated by the storm, though Honduras bore the brunt, with nearly every part of the country affected. In Nicaragua the damage was concentrated in pockets.

Fearing a flood of immigrants or a new round of instability in Central America, the United States has pumped about $170 million in disaster relief into Honduras in the last seven weeks and has canceled about $40 million of Honduras's enormous debt. Nicaragua has received similar levels of aid.

Tons of food and medicine have been shipped in and ferried to remote villages, mostly by American military helicopters and cargo planes. More than 800 United States military engineers have helped open roads and build fords across rivers where dozens of bridges were washed away.

President Clinton has even announced he will delay deporting illegal Honduran immigrants to the United States. Yet many parts of Honduras -- one of this hemisphere's poorest countries before the storm -- still barely function and will need months more of aid.

Though some roads are passable, the country's tattered infrastructure can now be washed away by one hard rainfall, United States military officers here say, and it will take billions of dollars to repair the bridges and roads.

Thousands of people are still trying to dig out from under mud that buried riverside towns of hard-hit regions. Thousands of others are camping in makeshift tents or living in temporary shelters, relying on handouts from the United Nations and the Roman Catholic Church. Many towns still have no potable water and their sewerage systems have been destroyed.

''We still need to do more,'' the United States Housing Secretary, Andrew Cuomo, said on a visit this month to announce an aid package. ''You had a country that was just struggling to get to their feet and this was a serious setback.''

Even worse than the destruction of houses has been the loss of jobs. Uncounted thousands of farmers, factory workers and plantation hands have either been laid off or have lost their crops, poultry and livestock. Most say they have no way to make a living.

With the economic outlook dismal at best, many of the younger Hondurans who can obtain visas are already migrating to the United States in search of work. Others have decided to take the illegal route through Mexico.

''I have at least five friends who have gone to Mexico and are waiting there trying to get over the border into the United States,'' said Kevin Sarrios, 21, a cabdriver in San Pedro Sula.

Though Mr. Sarrios has decided to stay in Honduras despite the lack of jobs and tourists, his wife left just after the storm struck for a six-month stint as a domestic servant in Colorado, leaving him with their year-old baby.

Other Hondurans have fewer options. On the main highway outside the once-thriving town of La Lima, a banana-growing center in the Sula Valley in the north, hundreds of banana plantation workers and farmers are living in a squalid row of tents and shacks.

On a recent rainy afternoon, children with no shirts clutched themselves against the chill air. Many were suffering from respiratory illnesses and diarrhea.

Shivering in a light rain, Catarino Cortez Gomez, 35, reached into a pocket with his calloused hands and carefully pulled out a notice from his former employer, Turnbull Agroindustria Asociada, a banana grower, to show to a visitor.

Tracing the words with his index finger, Mr. Cortez explained that he had been laid off for at least four months because the storm destroyed the banana plantations. His two young sons huddled next to his legs.

''One has to live by the grace of God,'' he said, ''because we don't have anything.''

Like most of the refugees in this sad row on the highway, Mr. Cortez saw his small house sink into the mud when the floods came during the hurricane. The zinc roof was washed away and all his belongings were destroyed. He waded to higher ground with his sons on his back. He says he has no savings and no way to make money if the banana companies do not hire again. His family is living in a tent, eating beans and flour distributed by a Catholic charity. ''We lost everything in that house,'' he said.

Inside La Lima, city workers with backhoes and bulldozers were working away at the tons of mud left by the floods. Nearly everyone in the town of 75,000 wore heavy rubber boots to wade through the thick ugly muck still covering all the streets. Here and there, homeowners struggled with shovels to clear mud out of their houses.

''Two months after the hurricane and we are still trying to the get the mud out,'' said Carlos Ramos, a 64-year-old contractor, leaning on a shovel in foul-smelling muck. ''What's bothering us the most is all the sewage that's flowing into the streets.''

German Henriquez, the municipal official in charge of public works, took a break from the cleanup efforts to tick off the town's woes. The floods washed away more than 175 houses, damaged 400 others and killed at least 12 people.

The waters destroyed four major bridges, damaged most of the roads and wrecked 80 percent of the sewers. Raw sewage now runs out into mud-filled streets in many neighborhoods. Though La Lima has received about $367,000 from the central Government to clean up, officials here estimate it will take about $44 million to repair the town's infrastructure.

At the same time, La Lima's major employers -- a subsidiary of the Chiquita Brands International and several smaller plantation owners -- have announced severe layoffs, and it will be at least a year before they rehire. About 700 families, many of them connected to the banana industry, are living in tents. ''We are destroyed financially,'' Mr. Henriquez said.

La Lima is not alone. Several other similar-sized Honduran towns -- like Pespire and Choluteca -- are in the same condition. Other small cities on the northern coast were cut off. To reach La Ceiba, for instance, trucks and buses must still ford a wide, fast-moving river and pedestrians are forced to cross on a narrow cable bridge.

Around them, dozens of smaller communities are also struggling to recover from vast flood damage with even fewer resources. One of the worst-hit villages was La Guacamaya, a hamlet about 20 miles east of San Pedro Sula, in the shadow of the mountains that mark the Sula Valley's eastern boundary.

During the storm, a landslide in the mountains blocked the small river that runs through La Guacamaya and created a lake. On Thursday, Oct. 29, the waters broke through the temporary dam and crashed down the mountain, flooding the town. About 82 of the town's 400 houses were buried to their rooftops in mud and the main bridge linking the village to the nearest large town, El Progreso, was washed away. Local officials managed to evacuate the town before the water rose too high and no one was killed.

This month, a team of United States Navy engineers from Gulfport, Miss., cleared away much of the mud along the village's main street and built fords around the destroyed bridge. But the people in La Guacamaya say it will be a long time before their village recovers.

To begin with, most of the men in the town work in a nearby Sonosa sugar plantation. The owners, having lost much of their crop, have halved the workers' salaries, from $30 a week to less than $15. Dozens of families are camped next to the wreckage of their homes.

Griselda Flores and her husband, Jose Pinto, managed to escape the floods just before their three-room house was buried in mud and water. Mr. Pinto woke the family and carried his two youngest children on his back to higher ground. For the last month, the Pinto family had been living in an improvised shack next to what remains of their home. Their seven acres of land was stripped of corn and beans.

Mr. Pinto has been laid off by the sugar plantation. They are surviving on handouts from the World Food Program and a few clothes donated by other charities.

''We have been living without shoes, clothes, nothing,'' Ms. Flores said. ''Without work it's not possible to recoup what we have lost, but someday perhaps we can, little by little.''

In a sense, the Pinto family is lucky. Houses can be rebuilt. For the family members of at least 3,000 people known to have died here and more than 2,000 reported missing, there is no hope of recovering the past.

In Balin, the village about 50 miles south of San Pedro Sula where 17 people were buried in a mudslide on Nov. 2, many relatives of the victims and their neighbors are talking about moving. Some say they are nervous the landslides may happen again. Others simply cannot bear the memory of the terrible night when they woke to a sound like the world ending and the screams of survivors half-buried in mud and rock.

''I would leave here if I could, but we have no place to go,'' Ms. Marina Morales said as her 2-year-old daughter climbed into her lap. ''We are all sad. We are trying to recuperate, but it's something very hard. Four members of my family are gone.''